Hiku said:
Marrying characters was optional in Fire Emblem Awakening and Fates. With the exception of the main character Chrom in Awakening, who would marry the woman he had the highest affinity with automatically by a certain chapter if you hadn't already married him with someone. |
Maybe I just don't know better, but doesn't marriage have a not insignificant impact on gameplay when it comes to units in the latter half of the game? Wouldn't not having the option to obtain those units put the player at a disadvantage, or at least an inconvenience? I don't believe that just because you don't have to do something, that it means that it's presence as an option is inconsequential. Especially when, from what I've been told, this dating focus effects how characters are written, turning them into flat harem archetypes in a way they weren't before in past games, which effects the game's narrative whether you participate marriage or not.
You don't have to use social links in Persona, for example, but not doing them makes the game significantly less fun mechanically, to the point where you're pretty much shooting yourself in the foot by not doing them. So simply calling it optional as if it was a completely superfluous side thing would be extremely disingenuous. I've never played Fire Emblem, but I'm willing to guess that this is the case there as well.
